Ok, I have some progress to report.
I agree, and I was very concerned that this might be the case. Actually not data loss but corrupted forms – I know many of you put in a LOT of work into forms and would rightfully be super upset if complex forms had to be rebuilt. Over the past few days there have been multiple reports of forms not updating properly, and that re-building the form fixed the problem, at least temporarily. Several databases were sent to me and I was able to duplicate the problem, and verify that when the text objects were deleted and re-created they started working. To me it appeared that the forms were very possibly getting corrupted, hence the alarm. Since I was unsure if your database forms were being corrupted by the minute, it seemed prudent to err on the side of caution.
The good news tonight is that I have determined that the problem is NOT due to corruption, at least not permanent corruption that is saved when the database is saved. If I reverse one of the code changes made in b19, the problem disappears and all is well, so there appears to be no risk of permanent damage to databases. So if you’re not encountering problems, I now believe it is safe to continue using b19.
There were several changes made in b19 to address crashes. These changes have apparently been spectacularly successful, yeah! Unfortunately, one of these changes is the one that caused this new problem of non-updating objects. So simply reversing the code change will increase the number of crashes again, allthough probably not by much – this particular crash was I think somewhat rare. But I’d definitely like to avoid putting a crash back in again!
I do now have an additional clue – it appears that the problem only occurs in limited situations, the most common being use of a Tab Panel object. (It’s not obvious because the buttons aren’t shown, but the Relational Workshop window does contain a Tab Panel object.) It appears that when switching tab panels Panorama sometimes gets wires crossed. In past versions, this could sometimes result in a crash. In the b19 version there is no crash, but objects stop working. Until tonight I had no idea that tab panels had this problem. Hopefully in the near future I can figure out how to fix the code so that it doesn’t crash and everything keeps working.
Note: I’m not 100% sure, but it appears that the problem may only occur if a form has text objects that are outside of the tab panel area. If all the text objects are inside the tab panel, the problem doesn’t occur. As it turns out, the databases sent to me with problems all had forms arranged this way, and so does the Relational Workshop.
Conclusion: If you use forms with tab panels, especially if there are text objects on the same form but outside the bounds of the tab panel, you should probably use b18 unless you can put up with text objects that may not update. The release of b20 will be expedited to provide a fix for this issue. If you don’t have forms with this configuration, continue using b19.
Update: After a bit of further investigation it appears that simply deleting objects could possibly trigger this problem. I haven’t actually seen this happen, but looking at the code this seems possible. Deleting any kind of object could possibly trigger the problem in other objects on the same form. In that case, closing and re-opening the form should restore proper operation.